


no heat from our mouths

by girlwiththeradishearrings



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Military, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Comfort/Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship/Love, Jon/Arya if you squint, Military, Sibling Love, Siblings, The Night's Watch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-19
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2018-02-05 07:36:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1810453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlwiththeradishearrings/pseuds/girlwiththeradishearrings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon is Lord Commander of a military base during the war. Val observes. Arya finds her way home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no heat from our mouths

There was once a time when she believed in the gods, Val allows herself to admit, although she's ashamed by the thought. How young she was then, how naive and stupid. That was a time of light winters and bountiful game, when her mother sang the songs of giants and her father stoked the fire with sturdy hands, his smile kind and warm. It almost amused her now, how she could only believe in something so insipid when she was safe and happy, but not now. Now she feared everything. Saw treachery behind every glance and malice inside each action.

 Where were her gods now?

Where were they when the squads brought back their fellows in pieces, when the gas and ash became the clouds and stained the snow with their poison, when blood ran in rivers and froze among the piss and shit, when it arrived in little pouches by the gallons to fill up the broken toy soldiers?

_Where where where?_

Jon used to believe, too. He kept the gods as a child and some days Val suspected the single reason his eyes still glowed with something other than fear was his never wavering belief in their mercy. Bitter laughter would die on her lips. The gods were not merciful. She would see him soundlessly moving his lips on the battlements, lost in thought, grey eyes scanning the regiments with a calculated authority. In the early days of the fighting, when things hadn't gotten so bad, she would find him down in the black brothers' old quarters, mouth always murmuring one prayer or another to his tree gods. He learned to stop believing, though, in time.

But his eyes stilled retained that soft glow. Hope it was, she decided. Jon may have lost his gods and his faith, but he still held his hope.

Val had thought that she might have been his hope.

When they buried Ygritte, Val had sensed Jon was waiting for her to say something. Words of wise wisdom to help him battle the grief and keep the demons at bay. She wouldn't lie to him—no, not Jon. Val would never lie to Jon. So instead she gave him words stripped and skinned of all tender frivolities and watched the light die in his eyes.

They lowered Ygritte's limp corpse into the cavity of earth where she would rest until time would dissipate her body to dust, and Val thought of all the parts of the girl she had loved. Her kissed-by-fire hair, always pinned from her cheeky face. The crooked tilt of her teeth. Her laugh: harsh and throaty. The call of her command resounding off the regimes. The click of her gun and her squinted eyes before she took her shot. She always had a talent for sharp shooting.

Val thought of all these things she would forget about Ygritte and then all the things Jon would remember, and it made her sick with sadness. Her hands trembled in her gloves and she looked at Jon who then met her gaze, looking at her with those Stark eyes of his, waiting for her to make the bad things go away. But once those bad things had started coming, Val knew they would never stop. She was perhaps Jon's best friend and closest companion, she would not tell him falsities and watch him crumble when things turned to shit again. She would make him stronger, she told herself.

"Val," he croaks in a voice so thin and small, yet he stands in his commander's uniform strong and unyielding to the wind beating at his back. Jon was not one to break.

She turns to face him, and releases her bottom lip from the clasp of her teeth, staring at his boots freshly polished for the funeral. "It’s time to put her away, Jon." His jaw twitches with withheld emotion and his head dips to his chest. "Put her away, lock her up tight cause you ain't ever gettin' her back. You know where she has to go." She reaches for his hand, but it's lifeless in her fingers. She was making him stronger. He needed to hear this. "She goes where all the bad things go, Jon Snow. Things you can't feel anymore. Things you don't want to feel. It hurts, I know. Trust me. I know, gods, it's tearing you up inside it hurts so bad, but you can't hold onto her. Ygritte's gone." Jon makes an indiscernible noise from the back of his throat and his eyes are clenched so tightly Val fears he'll never open them up again. She can't feel the heat of his body underneath his uniform, but her arms wrap around him all the same.

"Send her to the hurt locker, Snow. She can't reach you there."

She can't be sure but Val suspects she feels his nodding head rubbing against her shoulder. When he breaks away from their embrace his eyes are vacant and his shoulders eased. They start shoveling dirt onto the girl they once knew and Jon sharply turns and walks away, Val following.

 

* * *

 

Jon hadn’t been the same since they planted Ygritte in the ground. Sure, no one was untouchable--especially not by death, not in their line of work anyway. Yet in those succeeding weeks Jon was a phantom.

A body full of bones—broken pieces with no soul to hold them together.

So responsibility worked its way onto Val’s lap and she began to follow behind Jon, picking up the bits of him that he left in his tortured, unspoken wake. She was no caretaker, yet out of their unit Val knew the commander best. And it was just natural with Jon. She understood him. She could read the silence on him like a hound on the hunt, sniff out his intuition, his displeasure. They seemed to coexist easily enough, anyways.

Everyone in their squadron loved Ygritte, she was popular among the soldiers with her funny smile and filthy jokes. She could make even the dirtiest of men blush in shame. Jon did his fair share of blushing at her mercy.

Val supposed Jon had an affinity for collecting people the way some men collected coins or bottle caps. He found something amiable in everyone, could sympathize with nearly any situation, loved very bountifully, beautifully—no matter how reserved he seemed. His nature was significantly different from how he presented himself to his troops. Val saw through him within their first couple of weeks together. Neither was he as serious nor as cold as everyone suspected the commander to be.

Yet, the blank white depression lingered on Jon after Ygritte’s death. He didn’t stop being their officer when she died, but he stopped all jovial pretenses; he denied coming to dinner, refused invitations, spent all his time locked in the stacks with the Tarly boy, didn’t speak to his men unless it was to instruct or question. They were loyal to him, then and always, yet the boys’ burn of faith seemed to dwindle. They didn’t laugh half so much anymore and grew silent when Jon entered the room as if infected by the pain that ailed him.

This went on for months and Val had little hope for Jon Snow. It seemed the diggers buried more than a feisty soldier that day. Val suspected there was more to Ygritte and Jon, but she never questioned him on it—their relationship was none of her concern, although she did wonder.

Jon never discussed his family either. She had heard his elder brother mentioned a few times, he was some famous lad—inherited his father’s title as a lordling in the Northern Sector after old, noble Eddard Stark was assassinated. Robb was his name, Val remembered. Jon and he grew up as brothers. After asking around, she discovered Robb’s mother also had four other children. Two younger boys and two daughters. The eldest girl was married off to some Lannister twat apparently, after Jon’s father was killed. One boy in Tormand’s unit claimed to have met her once at a ceremony in White Harbor to announce a new trade agreement with the Manderly Fishing Company. He’d said she was pretty as a summer day, with a name just as lovely. Must not have been too lovely if the lad couldn’t remember it.

The little boys disappeared during a siege it was rumored, after Robb went to campaign once news of Ned Stark’s death reached the North lands. Jon holed up for two days when the Wall received word. That was one of the only times Val ever heard him talk about his siblings. She overheard him arguing with the Tarly lad. Eavesdropped, more like. She had hid around a corner while Jon and the boy had it out.

“—I can’t just leave them…”

“They’re not your responsibility now, Jon—“

“They have no one else, don’t you understand that? They cut my father down easily enough, they’ll do the same—“

“Jon, you don’t know that, you don’t kn—“

“What don’t I know, Sam!? They have my sisters, they’ve got Sansa—she was supposed to marry their bastard heir—and Arya—oh god what of Arya? Did it say anything about Arya—?“

“Jon, you need to calm down… It doesn’t say….”

That was the first and last time Val had ever heard that girl’s name. Arya. She was the second daughter.

They didn’t get any word from the capital after that, just rumors, nothing official. Most of it was made up tosh—and anyway, they had a war on leaving no time for idle commoners’ gossip. Jon had plenty to occupy his mind. He was the man responsible for a planning, scheduling, and executing a wide scouting route beyond the Wall. They were to ambush the Walkers, blindside them up the coastline.

Their heads were filled with nothing but strategy and fear for weeks. They thrived off nighttime hunts and sore, raw muscles: tearing themselves to shreds and healing over and over and over again. There was no time for family then. No spare moments to think of all the brothers lost and little girls called Arya.

 

* * *

 

 

They lost men on the coast, but killed plenty just the same. It was said for every brother that dropped, three more Walkers fell to match. Their numbers remained strong. The commander was pleased.

A few nights after they returned to the Wall, once the men had been fed a proper meal and gotten themselves stitched and cleaned, some boys from Val’s unit got together at Mole’s Town pub. They filled their bellies with laughter and ale. Jon even smiled some. The ache seemed to be subsiding, he no longer locked himself up so much, preferring instead to eat with his comrades. The boys told stories and jokes—even the ones about Ygritte didn’t pain Jon as they used to. Sometimes he joined in on the conversation, most nights he didn’t.

Val prided herself on that day in the snow. She had made him stronger, better for telling the truth.

Dead friends burned up your head like a fever, the memories of them and the echoes of their presence blackening and bruising your conscience. It took time to leave the dead brothers behind. But as much as the fallen troops ached, their deaths were nothing compared to a dead love. The withdrawal process was enough to kill: it slackened your senses, deteriorated your system, shut your nerves into dormant clumps; the strung out feeling in your chest was caused by an overdose of emotion, the lack of it all. Your lungs now chocked on dust and grief, nothing felt cognitive.

Val had lost people, too. Each more irreplaceable than the last. There was a shortage of companions these days.

But new recruits were dripping into the fold. Skinned skulls with shiny boots, creaseless uniforms: eager to pull triggers, intoxicated on explosive fumes, no clue of what lay beyond the Wall. Their insides were still pink and tender. Red and sweet like baby meat. The boys the capital sent were green and juvenile, thirsty for glory and craving the polished taste of blood at the backs of their tongues.

Yoren brought back the youths he found rotting in detention centers and border camps down South; half-manned establishments that served as dumping grounds for petty thieves and minor scumbags.

These were the kids unloaded from the trucks every couple of weeks, malnourished and defective. Their attitudes were almost as foul as their fighting technique. Most of them knew how to street brawl: nail swipes to the face, messy punches in the gut. But they wouldn’t last long in wartime. The trainers had to deconstruct them down to practically nothing before actual improvements could be made.

When Val wasn’t beside Jon in the command room charting out maps and battle strategies, she was in the yard exercising the young ones.

A new batch of recruits had arrived a fortnight previous and it was Val’s first night alone. Jon was in one of his moods. He was better off left alone, she had concluded, and didn’t need her reading over his shoulder.

The group Yoren had pulled this time was a treat. Some of the guys had come from King’s Landing, others from Harrenhal detainment center. All in all, the bunch was decent. They got a few meaty kids, some who were good with a rifle, others who were skilled with their fists.

Val had been mock-sparing with an elder boy for about an hour, showing him how to improve his footwork, how to keep his face impassive before he struck. He’d surprised her, this one. Large and sullen and dedicated. Somehow the fast pace at which he learned the moves and the concentration in his gaze as he watched her demonstrate made some chords in her chest clench and snap. Young soldiers like this always came through, did the training, followed orders, but their bodies were burned on funeral pyres just the same. Winter came calling for them all. Val was left nawing on the taste of their ashes for months.

“What’s your name, lad?” She’d asked after they’d finished. He wiped the sweat from his eyes before answering, breath coming heavy from his mouth.

“Gendry,” he huffed.

“You come up with Yoren?” He nodded in between breaths. “Eh, and where’d he snatch you lot from? You’re not a bloody volunteer are you?”

“No, officer. Yoren picked me and my lads from the capital. Some boys came from Harrenhal, though, they had a few bodies to spare.” Val pursed her lips, and readjusted her gun halter.

“Which ones are yer boys?” She prompted, scanning the variety of recruits surrounding the yard.

Gendry scratched his cheek and glanced around. He pointed out a few skinny, battered kids by the names of Lommy and Hot Pie.

He searched around a bit longer, scanning the perimeters of the yard. Spitting at the ground, he scuffed over the dirt with his boot, tentative. “...And that’s Arry.”

 

* * *

                 

If Val was Jon Snow’s hope, then this girl was his salvation.

The recruits called her Arry. She was stick thin and smeared with dirt and grime. Upon first impression, she gave off an aura comprised of aggression and petulance. Her true nature--once the outer layers of hostility were worn down--revealed to be unfailing kindness and perception. The recruits assumed she was still a boy despite the revelation of her identity, most likely attributed to her strong features and short hair.

But Jon knew her as Arya. That’s the name he shouted from the barracks and it’s what he whispered frantically into her tiny shoulders as he grabbed her and crushed her body into his chest. It was the name of his sister and the name of his father’s daughter, a girl so dear and precious in his memory, he could not fathom letting her stray from sight nearly a moon’s turn upon her return to him.

Hope only lasted so long, yet salvation was everlasting.

**Author's Note:**

> I had planned on it being longer, but that's what I tell myself every time. Sorry if it's abrupt. 
> 
> Title after "Winter" by Daughter.


End file.
